La Vita Nuova

"Our notion of faith or belief always allows for the possibility of disbelief. 'Faith' requires as its opposite a false belief, a heresy; it is tied to a dogma which people must either attack or defend with their very lives. All this was foreign to the Greeks; they looked upon their gods as so natural and self-evident that they could not even conceive of other nations acknowledging a different faith or other gods. To the Christians who landed in America the gods of the the Indians were of...